The New York Times
[Dudman] is candid and even amusing about her general obliviousness to the wider world in those days. But it is clear that she now writes as someone keenly aware of how her actions appear in hindsight. Ms. Dudman eventually discovered, by way of Haight-Ashbury and other detours, that she would rather not spend her life in a daze. — Janet Maslin
Publishers Weekly
As middle-aged Dudman (Augusta, Gone) watches a cluster of rebellious teenagers sitting on a bench in her Maine town, she finds herself wondering what happened to her own crazy youth. How did she become an adult, married woman, "cutting out coupons for the Shop 'n Save" after spending much of the late 1960s looking for sex, smoking marijuana and dropping LSD? Raised in an upper-class Washington, D.C., family, Dudman attended the elite Madeira School, where all her friends had famous fathers and were "raised to be something." But Dudman had more pressing items on her agenda, like figuring out boys and sex and getting rid of her virginity. Volunteering to work for Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign in 1968, Dudman left home and met a variety of willing boys. Once the sex hurdle was over, she was able to relax and drift from light pot-smoking to serious acid-tripping. From there, she moved on to Antioch College and pursued a fuller hippie lifestyle. In time, the whole scene-acid, back-to-the-earth communes, bumming around Europe-became more trouble than it was worth. Dudman yearned for a life that wasn't so "confusing." There was much she still didn't understand, but she could at least accept that "there's a lot between who I am, who I always thought I would be, and what I will eventually become-and that somehow all those people are the same." Dudman's willingness to admit she didn't figure everything out and her kindness toward her old reckless self make this account of her woollier years surprisingly endearing. Agent, Betsy Lerner. (Mar. 1) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A memoir of life as a teenager in the 1960s: perfectly remembered, unfiltered through the years. "All that excitement," she recalls, "all that feeling of being at the center of things, all that sense of justification and deliverance and magical power." She admits: "It's easy now to see only the ridiculousness of it-the terrible clownlike costumes, the lost lives spun out and destroyed by drugs, bad driving, crazy risks," but it was her life, and she spins it out with a wonderful palpability. Sex was ever-present, not so much the act, but the abiding curiosity thereof: "You knew or you didn't know. You'd say or you'd say you'd say but you didn't say because you either knew and didn't say or you didn't know and couldn't say and I sure didn't know." She looks back at those days of war, Eugene McCarthy, Kurt Vonnegut, Phil Ochs, and Langston Hughes. She admits to a hearty dose of adolescent angst that reached deep and seized her gut: "It wasn't one thing . . . whatever it was had to do with the way sometimes I got so scared. It had to do with a kind of hunger that I didn't understand." Sex was eclipsed by dope-acid, uppers, and (heaven help her) No Doz-which trashed her relationship with her parents. Although her mother isn't depicted with much sympathy, the author portrays her father, a savvy foreign correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, as a brick, so her drug-fueled estrangement from him is like a knife wound. As she was scraping bottom, bowling on acid for her gym credits at Antioch College, her father was kidnapped by the Khmer Rouge and the world shifted on its axis-though Dudman (Augusta, Gone, 2001) would never suggest it was as neat as this. She began to gather the tattersof her life about her and shape them into something gratifying. As evident and actual as living theater.
